Tag: hooks

This weekend, I attended the first DrupalCamp in the Sacramento, California area. It happened to be held in Davis, a location which worked for me.

Some of you might know that I was talking about taking Amtrak’s Coast Starlight up to the Bay Area. I indeed did. Here’s some pictures: (flickr link coming soon; I have to upload the pictures).

But as for the camp itself, it’s best to break it down into the sessions I attended and then give my overall impressions.

Day 1

As every attendee certainly did, I started off my day listening to Nate Haug (@quicksketch)’s keynote speech. He talked about the community, contributing, contributing productively, collaboration, and the care shown to community members. It was a good start. After that, I went to my first session.

10-11:30: VoIP for Drupal: Turning Drupal into a phone system

The title of this presentation had intrigued me, and I’m glad I checked it out. Adam Kalsey (@akalsey) of Tropo did a fantastic job of demonstrating the VoIP module and how command sets could be sent to phone systems using PHP code.

1:00-2:30 – Using Drupal as an Application Development Platform

This was a neat presentation as well. It was also presented by Adam Kalsey. His thesis was essentially that Drupal is an application development platform that ships with a great CMS as its default implementation. He defended this fairly, outlining many of the subsystems that I indeed deal with regularly.

2:30-4:00 – Building a Distribution using Features, Drush Make, Installation Profiles, and more

Ben Shell gave a fascinating presentation on the topic above. I found this very useful, as it cleared up some questions I had regarding the whole thing. I liked how he spoke a bit about how to get drupal.org to fully package your distribution or installation profile for download!

Some dude who came from L.A. gave this one. I think his name was Kevin Kaland or something. Of course it was awesome; would I say otherwise? Fortunately, you don’t have to listen to me; Doug R. Wu has given a brief “str8up” account of the talk. That coupon code expires Monday, by the way.

Day 2

Morning-12 – Code sprint

Saturday ran late for some reason, and I got lost on the way back to campus, so I rolled in around 11 AM. I discovered that no organized code sprint was happening, so I worked more on adding Webform token support to Fill PDF on Drupal 7. This is completed now.

1:00-2:30 – Why Drupal uses hooks, and why you should too

I bumped into that Kevin Kaland guy again at this talk. Something about hooks in Drupal. People liked it or something. (If you blogged about this talk, can you link to it in the comments?)

2:30-4:00 – Know Where The Fire Is (Monitoring Drupal Sites)

I wrapped up my camp with Mike Hathaway’s Nagios talk. It was cool; Nagios is definitely a tool l will have to try some time, along with the Drupal Nagios module of course!

Conclusion

So ended my camp, and so began my transportational journey back…with a new sticker on my laptop!

Thanks again goes to Oliver Seldman for inviting me to co-present this with him originally and for all the help with the slides and content, especially the simplicity of the presentation. Please give him your money.

This is another quick update to let you know that I will be presenting on two topics on Drupal Camp Sacramento Area. You can read the presentation summaries for full details, but I’ll give a little bit of info here too.

Why Drupal uses hooks, and why you should too

This presentation will introduce you to hooks – what they are, why Drupal itself uses them, and a live demo of hooks in action. If you want to learn to develop for Drupal or want to understand better what options your developers have, check it out: Why Drupal uses hooks, and why you should too

I’ve seen a lot of people working in or working for real estate and in sports-related areas using Fill PDF lately, and it was originally conceived for use with legal forms. I wanted to show how it can be used to populate these kinds of forms without forcing visitors to leave the Web site and hoping they come back. Do you think there’s a need for this? Search Twitter for “fill pdf”, and you will be surprised! People complain every day about having to fill out and send back PDFs. They too want the process to be easier! There’s a module for that! Check it out: Streamline your workflow with Fill PDF – fill your PDF templates with your site’s forms

WizOne Solutions is going to make Web attendee badges again for this camp…stay tuned over the next couple of days!

A week ago, I presented with Oliver Seldman at the Downtown Drupal meetup in L.A. It was a presentation to get people’s feet wet on using hooks. We kept it as simple as possible, demonstrated an example, and took some questions.